Apple announces MacBook Air refresh, all-new US-made Mac Pro

Apple announced an entirely new line of MacBook Airs at WWDC 2013. The company refreshed its skinny laptop with the latest and greatest from Intel -- namely, their new Haswell processor. Particularly, the refreshed laptops will use the ULT variants of the chip, which should result in 40% faster graphics and much improved battery life, up to nine hours in the 11-inch model and 12 hours with the larger 13-inch model.

Also new is support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi, the faster and not-yet-finalized standard that should greatly improve range and bring wireless transmission speeds up to a theoretical 1300Mbps. You’ll need to upgrade your router for that, of course, so naturally new AirPort base stations and Time Capsules are forthcoming as well.

Available today, the new MacBook Airs maintain the same pricing structure as their predecessors: $999 and $1,199 for the 11-inch model in 128GB and 256GB capacities, respectively, as well as $1,099 and $1,299 for the 13-inch variant with similar 128GB and 256GB storage options. Rest of specs are the same, we assume.

Next up, Apple surprised attendees by announcing an all new Mac Pro -- a model aimed squarely at the professional market that had been largely neglected for the past couple of years.

Design-wise the new Mac Pro is 1/8 the size of its older sibling and it features plenty of niceties under the hood. Among them are six Thunderbolt 2 ports -- enabling 4K video support and faster data throughput -- four USB 3 ports, dual AMD FirePro graphics, full flash storage, and up to 12 processing cores.

Keeping up with an earlier promise to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US, the new Mac Pro takes a step into that direction with the announcement that it will be fully assembled stateside. We’ll have to wait for pricing details as the new machine isn’t due until later this year (check out the beautiful product page).